Peter Auriol

Abstract

The French Franciscan Peter Auriol (c. 1280–1322) taught at Bologna, Toulouse, and finally Paris, where he lectured on the Sentences in 1316–1318 and taught as master until 1321, when he was made archbishop of Aix-en-Province shortly before his death. Auriol composed popular treatises on poverty, natural philosophy, and the Immaculate Conception, various versions of a huge commentary on the Sentences, an important Quodlibet, and a significant Bible commentary. In his Sentences commentary and Quodlibet – especially his great Scriptum commentary on I Sentences – his explicit attacks on Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and other giants, his proud independence, his provocative originality, and his general brilliance made Auriol perhaps the most influential Parisian theologian in the period after Scotus, although this influence was often negative. Auriol had a broad readership into the seventeenth century, and his works were printed frequently from before 1475 to 1695. Auriol is best known for his positions on ontology, cognition, divine foreknowledge, grace, and predestination. His systematic approach allows us to trace common threads in his teaching: conceptualism and the rejection of realism, a strong emphasis on human free will and a thorough denial of determinism, and a strict interpretation of divine simplicity and necessity. His appeal to creative devices and terms to construct his theories, among them “apparent being,” “indistance,” and “indistinction,” make his opinions immediately recognizable in the works of his successors, who more often than not argued against him.